Entry 6 – Letting go of a life without blogging

2025 - Why on earth am I doing this Substack? Illustrated with mandalas by Sara

Sara, me, Ivan, and Robert in 2024. We were at a prom for older LGBTQs hosted by the Brooklyn Community Pride Center.

Brain burpees by blogging

Last night I was out with my friend Ivan. We were having coffee and dessert at Martha’s Country Bakery. We were also with his husband Robert and my wife Sara. Every year we all get together to celebrate our birthdays with dinner and dessert.

I’ve known Ivan since the 1980s; we met when we were both in our 20s. Now we are both in our 60s. Ivan subscribes to my blog and I’m pleased that he does but also feel self-conscious about what he may think of it.

“Do you enjoy doing your blog?” Ivan asked me while he waited for his cheesecake.

“Yes, I really enjoy doing my blog,” I replied to Ivan, appreciating his question. “I feel it helps with my cognitive thinking.”

Since I’ve been blogging, I feel like my brain’s neural pathways are “lighting up,” like multi colored Christmas lights blinking all over my head. It’s a good feeling. I feel like I am challenging my mind. It’s like writing a novel versus reading a novel. Or creating a television series versus watching a television series. Blogging is a lot easier than writing a novel or creating a TV series but you get the picture. I used to do cross word puzzles that were fairly easy. I could finish one in about 30 minutes and always felt smarter afterwards. I read somewhere that doing crossword puzzles is good for your brain but creating them is even better. So I thought, “that could be fun” and created a simple crossword puzzle using names of people I knew and simple words for the answers. It turned out to be one of the most difficult projects I’ve ever done and took me days to complete. Even though it was not easy I felt creating a crossword puzzle was an accomplishment.

Thinking up ideas of what to blog about and then doing the work of forming sentences to describe my thoughts has been both challenging and rewarding. A lot of my life I studied art, not writing; I’m no English major. So blogging is a new way to express myself, using a different canvas and tools. I think of blogging as a creative endeavor. It’s personal and expressive. Even though Gay Parent Magazine is my creation, the occasional writing I do for the magazine is usually not personal.

With blogging, it can be unstructured and whatever I want it to be. Honestly, I’m seeing where it takes me. So far, it’s been part memoir and part travelogue. With this entry, I’m answering Ivan’s question, which in turn makes me reflect on, “Why on earth am I doing this blog?”